He sat on the edge of the tub, fully facing Emery in his plastic stool. "How about me paying it forward? Repaying a debt to someone I'll never be able to repay directly?"

"If this is about the money Emma left you, she wanted you to—"

"Not everything is about Emma. If things had been different, I could have been you."

That got Emery's attention. "You? How?"

Josh didn't want to tell him, no, but he had to in order to mislead Emery. That was a conscious decision. Better give him some of his past as the full reason and leave out the part where it was Emery he couldn't bear to think of as homeless and alone. "I came out when I was 15. Just went home on a Friday night, sat at dinner, and thought it was time to tell my parents I liked boys better than girls. I guess it was naive of me, but I thought it'd be alright. It's not as if my parents were zealots or particularly conservative, and they'd always been good parents, until that day — I thought it'd be alright," he repeated, as if it somehow needed to be said twice to be understood.

"My mother started crying, spewing some rhetoric about selfish boys who didn't know what they wanted and broke their mothers' hearts. How she wanted grandchildren and I was going to die with 'that gay disease'. My dad just put his arm around her, looked at me, and told me to go to my room. To sleep on it, and if I told them at breakfast I was just acting out then all would be forgiven. And if I didn't I could grab my things and go because I wouldn't be their son anymore."

It was only when Josh heard Emery's sharp inhale without really seeing it that he realized he was staring through Emery, lost in memory. This wasn't one he was in the habit of revisiting, but it still held weight, after all these years.

"I went to bed and told myself things would be different in the morning. Still packed a backpack with some clothes and what money I had from odd jobs I'd done during the summer — I've always been good with my hands, and I'd been helping one of the neighbors with her fence, restoring parts of it, painting, that sort of thing. It was pocket change, nothing that would get me a room for more than a couple of nights, but I didn't really know what else to do, so I just held on to the hope that I wouldn't have to find out how to go from there."

Emery made a motion with his still shaky hand, as if he were reaching out. Before Josh could take it in his own and clasp it, the comforting touch spreading in both directions, Emery dropped it once more. Whether Emery had decided against it or Josh had imagined what it meant, he didn't know, but the absence of that near promise was a physical ache. Josh breathed slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth, eyes trapped in Emery's.

"Morning came and nothing changed. I won't lie, I thought about it. Thought about telling them I wasn't gay after all, thought of hiding who I was for the rest of high school and maybe go to college and then I could be me. But it just... I couldn't. I'd trusted them and they pulled the rug out from under me as if I weren't their son; as if I were nothing. 'You can either be something you're not or I won't have you as my son anymore,' and all this without even the excuse of religious extremism. As if my having children or not had anything to do with them. As if I were less likely to catch AIDS by them kicking me out. As if they were showing me tough love, slapping my hand for misbehaving."

As he'd been talking, Emery's expressive brown eyes turned as anguished as Josh felt. "Josh..."

He couldn't. He couldn't keep telling Emery this, exposing himself like this, to someone who held the kind of power Emery still held over him, all while looking into eyes that could undo him without trying. This wasn't what he'd rushed over to Central Park to accomplish — there had to be something else he could do to dispel the tension. He got up to retrieve a pair of tweezers only to sit back in front of Emery. "Give me your foot," he said abruptly. "Might as well do something with my hands while we talk."

For once Emery didn't fight him — he looked as though he was about to, but in the end, he didn't, allowing Josh to position the plastic stool so Emery's foot would be hovering over the bathtub. Josh washed off the worst of the dirt before beginning the painstaking task of removing the slivers of rock and chips of wood from Emery's wound. Emery had fallen silent, waiting for the rest.

"In the end, I left. I grabbed the backpack with my things and left. Even then I didn't go far. It was the weekend and I just sort of sat down on the bus stop across the street for two days, hoping that my mom or my dad — both, ideally — would come get me and apologize. Then on Sunday the neighbor I'd done the fence work for saw me there and came to ask what I thought I was doing, slumming it in the bus stop like that; if I didn't have better places to go at my age, and if not why wasn't I studying instead."

He concentrated on his task as he spoke, his tale a little easier away from Emery's piercing eyes. "She was scary in a primary school teacher sort of way. Weathered and gray, ramrod straight, always looked at everyone as if they'd personally offended her. She seemed older than time itself, and smoked like a chimney to boot. After the way my parents had reacted I thought she'd be disgusted by me — I mean, she was older and stricter, it felt logical. I only told her because I wanted my parents to be embarrassed that everyone would know they'd raised a gay son, because that was so obviously something I'd done on purpose, to spit on their faces."

It was a struggle, not to clench his hand around Emery's foot when he remembered those days, the very real anger masking the gaping hurt he'd felt when he'd been cast out. "She looked positively terrifying when she told me to 'wait here a moment, dear' — I don't think she'd ever called anyone 'dear' in her life. She marched across the street to my parents' house and all anyone could hear was her yelling about how some people were unfit to have children. I think my dad tried to say something to the tune of it being his house and she told him she hadn't given him leave to speak yet. She was magnificent."

The first foot dealt with, or as much as it was going to be before Emery's bath, he switched to the second one, the one he'd thought might not be bleeding, but that was somehow worse for it. "Then she got into my parents' house and came back out with suitcases filled with my things, as if it were all perfectly normal. She came to get me at the bus stop and told me to go home with her. That she wasn't in the habit of hating people for who they loved. And she took me in, just like that."

There were scraps of fabric from Emery's ruined sock stuck to the wound. Each strand Josh removed, no matter how carefully, made it bleed again. There was a parallel he didn't want to think about in there somewhere. How long had Emery been walking around barefoot? Wanting to be left alone in Central Park, with nothing to keep him warm or fed, instead of accepting any kind of help?

Thinking about that was less of a distraction than he'd hoped, bringing him back to his tale. "She was stricter than my parents were — I had a tighter curfew, she monitored my grades and my studying habits like a hawk, and at any point when I was just idling she'd immediately find something that needed repairing or an errand that needed to be run — but she made me feel welcome. And she was never bothered that I was kissing a boy instead of a girl, provided I wasn't kissing anyone past eleven pm."

His gaze was drawn to the small wooden house on his charm bracelet, a half-smile on his lips at the bittersweet memory as he rinsed Emery's foot. "And that's it. I'll never be able to pay her back, but if you'll let me help you then I'll feel like I did her proud. Then maybe you can go and help someone else further down the line."

Emery's lips twisted into something rueful but never unkind. "And that's why I should let you bathe me?"

"Unless you want me to sit outside with my ear to the door for two hours, listening for the sound of you drowning in the bathtub in your sleep. And I thought you wanted to stop 'spreading filth' in my bathroom? It'll be quicker with my help. Again, it's not like I haven't bathed people before. Please let me help you."

Emery sighed. "I don't mean to make you beg to help me when I'm the one in need, Josh. I don't mean to be difficult. It's just... Hard for me to accept help from someone when I don't have the ability to pay them."

Josh let go of Emery's foot as if he'd been burned. "Right," he spat without thinking, "we're both aware of your compulsive need to pay people for their services." The vitriol in his tone had been unplanned, but he couldn't quite swallow it down. Damn it. Emery had been trying to offer an olive branch, he knew, but it was the worst kind of offering, thorny and painful.

Emery shrunk in on himself and said nothing, looking small and lost with his shaved head and filthy torn clothes under the fluorescent lights. Josh took some care to make his voice more pleasant. "I know you're not actively trying to be difficult; it's just that it comes naturally to you and you're so very good at it."

Locked away inside himself, Emery didn't react to Josh's weak humor. "I apologise. If the offer still stands I'd be grateful for the help."

"Good." Josh turned the hot water back on. "I'm going to help you get in the tub, put the stool in so you can sit — don't give me that look, you're not in any condition to stand with your feet like that — and then you can wash whatever sensitive bits you'd like and I'll do the rest. If it suits your royal majesty," he added in a further attempt at levity that garnered no reply.

Emery's clothes, from the tattered remains of his socks to his once gloriously tailored shirt, went straight into the same plastic bag as the hair, and then they began.

Josh tried not to look, he did, but it was impossible. He found his eyes repeatedly drawn to yellow bruises on Emery's abdomen; to ribs that seemed on the verge of breaking through the skin for lack of flesh. Once he'd seen those, any lingering resentment for Emery's previous comment faded into nothing. Josh remembered his earlier resolution to offer the man plenty of chances to be touched and made it a point to use his bare hands, rather than the sponge, when rinsing his upper back for the final time.

He wasn't sure all the droplets on Emery's cheeks were water, but it wasn't for him to know. Maybe he was projecting — his own eyes stung whenever he looked at the evidence of what Emery had gone through. His shoulder blades were right under Josh's fingertips, far too sharp. When was the last time he'd had a decent meal?

Leaving Emery sitting on the plastic stool, hot water still cascading on him, Josh went to get the heaviest, most comfortable Turkish cotton robe he owned. It would have been comically large on Emery, had Josh felt the slightest inclination to smile.

All he felt was relief, to see Emery wearing something clean at long last. The bath had drained him of his fight along with the grime; he didn't complain when Josh dried him, or when he tied the belt around his waist as if Emery were a child. Josh turned his attention to the blood crusted on Emery's brow, wiping it with care as he pretended to need his other hand on Emery's face for support.

After the conversation they'd had, neither of them had any words left as Josh applied antibiotic cream to Emery's feet before bandaging them with a long wrap of gauze. It wasn't a professional job by any means, but it had to be better than slipping into Josh's slippers with nothing to prevent the wounds from reopening.

If Emery shared the awkwardness Josh felt at having to wear a pair of borrowed too-large boxers, he didn't show it. He looked ready to fall asleep where he stood, the short walk between the bathroom and the living room tiring him out so much he sunk into the sofa rather than sitting on it. Josh would have been glad to feed him Sam's soup, but he didn't think Emery's complacency would extend to being literally spoon-fed; Josh was left to hover near the sofa, watching Emery's shaky hand make its way from the bowl on the coffee table to his lips. Two spoonfuls in and he'd fallen asleep, but at least he was safe for the time being, Josh mused while putting a blanket over him.

Josh was almost in his bedroom when he decided he couldn't risk Emery fleeing in the morning — and he wouldn't put it past the man, to just get up and go in a bathrobe and slippers — without giving Josh the opportunity to talk him out of it. Back to the living room he went. Two perfectly usable beds in the house and Emery was lying curled on the too-small sofa while Josh would spend the night struggling to get comfortable in the armchair. What a pair they made.